Guest editorial

Citation

Platje, J. and Leal Filho, W. (2008), "Guest editorial", Management of Environmental Quality, Vol. 19 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/meq.2008.08319baa.001

Guest editorial

Joost PlatjeProfessor at the Faculty of Economics of Opole University (Poland). He received his PhD at Groningen University (The Netherlands) on the topic “Institutional change and Poland’s Economic Performance since the 1970s – incentives and transaction costs”. His current research focuses on the application of theories of New Institutional Economics to issues of sustainable development.

Walter Leal FilhoProfessor and Head of the Research and Transfer Centre “Applications of Life Sciences” at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany.

Welcome to this special issue of MEQ, containing a selection of papers from the 7th international conference on “Current Issues of Sustainable Development”, held in April 2007 in Opole (Poland), as well as two interesting further papers on environmental management in Chile and Saudi Arabia.

The papers from the “Current Issues of Sustainable Development” conference consider the importance of institutions and governance, as well as the role of business for sustainable development and environmental management issues. As the achievement of sustainable development requires policy and activities at different levels, an institutional approach, interdisciplinary by its nature, may be useful. The general question is not only to what extent government policy at different administrative levels, but also culture and mental models influence the functioning of markets and enterprises, and in turn hamper or contribute to sustainable development. This is related to Donna Meadows’ argument about leverage points – where to intervene most effectively in the system in order to achieve sustainable development? For example, companies may use environmental management systems for marketing reasons and to increase competition, but when management and employees are not really convinced of its usefulness, positive effects for the environment are likely to be small. Other questions concern e.g. how to create effective policy to get enterprises interested in environmental issues, and to stimulate them to use longer time-horizons in decision making.

The institutional basis for environmental management and sustainable development is likely to increase in importance in a world where not only the economy is globalising, but also environmental problems seem to become of a more and more cross-border or global nature. This poses the question – who is able to influence what kind of sustainable development? We hope that the papers, besides enjoyable reading, provide some thoughts on these issues.

Enjoy your reading!

Joost Platje, Walter Leal Filho